Elizabeth Peyton

The Cat Show at White Columns has everything and nothing to do with cats. Everything, because most of the 134 artworks show cats or cat-related ephemera—like litter boxes, scratching posts, or yarn. Nothing, because the themes of many of these works aren’t about cats at all.

That topless Bea Arthur painting goes up to auction today. More than two decades after John Currin’s sexy homage to maturity, we still expect a few giggles will be heard across the auction room floor. [Gawker]

Pardon us, but this week, all art news is auction news. We promise to round out the Warhol fluff with more interesting stuff, like say, the fact that, for the first time ever, a Canadian auction house will put video art up on the auction block. [The Star]

Elizabeth Peyton joins a new club, the tiny club for female artists whose work has sold for a million or more at auction. It’s not an actual club, but if it were, she would be in it. [Twitter, via Christie’s]

Unrelated to anything to do with art at all, a massacre in Syria has resulted in the most depraved actions yet by the Assad government. Even reading this report requires a stomach of steel. [NYTimes]

Are Cooper Union’s Finances Fixable? Felix Salmon suggests that perhaps Cooper’s “Chrysler Building land — with its PILOTs intact — could get sold to Trinity Church, or one of New York’s big non-profit hospitals, or even possibly the Bloomberg Foundation.” It’s a fantastic piece and a must-read for anyone who’s been following this story. [Felix Salmon, Reuters]

Now you can sleep easy at night; Paul McCarthy’s massive red balloon dog at Frieze has been sold. [ArtInfo]

One of the great opportunities Venice affords is the chance for artists to fully transform a space. Nearly every pavilion gets a complete makeover every two years, but this came to mind particularly when looking at the exceptions. Take Canada’s Steven Shearer, a well-known painter and sculptor represented by Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. He’s worked in large formats before. In 2008, he produced a bad boy metal-music flop of a show at The New Museum that included a giant room-sized cube made of black PVC pipe. This year though, only a tiny bronze maquette of this same piece was on display in the Pavilion and it looked like it was for sale. Add to this, a vetrine full of sub-standard sketchs and a poem in which the individual words did more to express the abject than their combination, and you’ve got a pavilion people will discuss almost entirely in the negative.